A Forgotten Jazz Great

Warning:  This post is deeply off topic.  But if you love the music of the 1920s to '40s, read on.

Quiz:

Props to you if you guess the identity of this great but somehow neglected singer of blues, jazz and pop / swing.

1. This singer helped spark the career of Bing Crosby, a childhood friend.

2. Was the first real jazz band singer.

3. Strongly influenced singers as diverse as Billie Holiday, Connee Boswell, Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. Diverse in style and race.

4. Was the first woman -- really, just about the first white musician/singer of either sex -- to front an all-black band.  In fact, she wasn't all "white"; her mother was a Coeur d'Alene Indian.

5. Had her first monster hit with "Rocking Chair," the Hoagie Carmichael piece of corn that she raised to a level of emotional reality.

6. Died penniless, sick and alcoholic at 44 years old.

Read on to discover who was this singer with the perfect diction, rhythmic daring and impressive emotional range.

Mildred Bailey in 1945.
Six more years to live.

Until 7-8 years ago Mildred Bailey was someone I was vaguely familiar with.  I'd come across the name a number of times and I had heard a couple of her well-known tunes, notably "Thanks for the Memory."  After downloading a few of her songs on Napster in 2000, I had to buy a couple of CDs.  I loved her versions of the "old standards" as well as tunes which haven't fared as well since ca. 1930. She could swing, could do gutsy blues as well as Ethel Waters (another favorite of mine and an artistic model for Mildred herself), and could wring a sigh or a tear out of you better than anyone because she was dead-on exact in her expression of emotion.

She also played with notes, sang against the beat and improvised in the best jazz traditions.  She had a rather small voice but her clarity of diction, phrasing and emotion was unparalleled in that era. Well, Billie Holiday had a small voice and a narrow vocal range, not to mention a narrower emotional range than Bailey. Unlike Holiday, Bailey could convincingly convey happiness too.

I won't detail her career, or her life and its loves and sorrows, which you can scan here and here.  For more about Bailey the artist, check these well-written and heart-felt reviews of one of her compilation albums (mine is on order) on Amazon.

One of the reviews that really gave me pause was the one signed "bix lang pastafagiole" (well, there's the Italian connection taken care of!).  An admirer of Bailey and the other greats of the Golden Age of Jazz, "bix" aka Chris in real life, writes a cogent critique of the neglect of Mildred Bailey and some others as an effect of an after-the-fact segregation of jazz.  The mythology has arisen in recent decades that jazz was exclusively a black invention, and that white musicians were somehow freeloaders or hangers-on, at worst artistic thieves.  The mythology is manifestly false; from its beginnings in New Orleans jazz was a product of cultural and social (and other types of) mixing.  It was a fusion music, and as Chris notes, from very early days the white contribution to the art was genuine and profound.  In short, it was a collaboration, which in itself was a revolutionary act.

Here are a couple of especially cogent quotes from Chris's review (thank you, Chris):

Let's be clear from the start---Mildred Bailey was a white jazz singer whose career stretched from the mid-1920s through the WWII era. Mildred Bailey was also the first female jazz singer to front a band, and she was arguably the greatest female jazz singer whoever lived. No qualification necessary here. Again, Mildred was white, and I emphasize this point only because Ken Burns and other white jazz historians seem to think that they're doing the African American community some favor by pretending that only blacks in jazz really mattered. Bailey sang jazz just as Bix Beiderbecke (who was also white) played jazz and few, if any---black or white---did it better.

Later he writes:

It has become rather annoying that every time an accolade is written about a great white jazz singer or jazz musician the author feels compelled to "qualify" his praise of that artist by mentioning that he or she was indeed "white." The implication being that he or she was great only as far as white jazz artists are concerned. There is no need for such mushy left wing, politically correct, vacuous apologetics. There has been an unjustifiable neglect of a long, rich white jazz tradition that stretches as far back as the 1880s in cities like New Orleans, and to admit this is not taking anything away from a similarly long and great black jazz tradition. It is simply that the dawn of jazz was as populated by great Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans and other ethnic Americans as it was by African Americans. There were great black jazz artists and there were great white jazz artists...  Somehow Mr. Burns seemed to miss that rather substantial slice of jazz history in his documentary. [It was one of the things that pissed me off about it too.  It seemed like a pageant of Black victimhood set to music.]  No one need qualify that the greatest coronet player in Jazz history is Bix Beiderbecke, who was white. Similarly, the greatest trumpet player in all of jazz was Louis Armstrong, who was black... The point is, black Americans don't own jazz anymore than Woody Guthrie owns folk music. This is the same ignorance that allows nitwits to proclaim that Elvis Presley was the King of Rock and Roll ...

...it is about time that both white and black jazz artists get their fair recognition. It is a sad but true fact that past racial discrimination against African-Americans was rampant, immoral, and abominable. For years the great early black jazz performers like King Oliver were cruelly underappreciated, if not totally neglected. But pretending that all of Jazz was solely a black cultural phenomenon and that all documentaries on the history of Jazz must focus exclusively on black artists in order to compensate for past discrimination is as deranged and as delusional as white racism was horrific. In the case of Mildred Bailey, enough is enough. Bailey was a great singer, plain and simple....Bailey had perfect pitch and intonation. To my mind, both Bailey and Fitzgerald were superior jazz vocalists to Holliday (and note, Bailey was white, Fitzgerald black). Mildred introduced so many classics it would take pages to list them, but among them are "Ghost of A Chance," "I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm," "Georgia On My Mind," and "Rock'n Chair." Whether an up tempo swing tune or a smoky ballad, Mildred put a song over with musical brilliance.

Obese, ill, and impoverished, Mildred Bailey died in relative obscurity in 1951 and has since been largely forgotten. No movies or books about her life. Jazz collections advertised on TV invariably exclude her. Just as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey helped pioneer female blues singing back in the 1920s, Mildred Bailey did the same for jazz. She should be remembered and this collection is a step in rekindling her memory for true lovers of jazz---of all races, colors, and creeds. We need to replace political correctness with historical correctness.

This was an unexpected treat to find in an Amazon review.  These things too often seem like a plant by a record company's PR firm.  This was interesting, provocative and factually correct.  Thank you Chris. 

By the way, here are two little examples of the mix that is jazz.

People who haven't heard Mildred Bailey before often assume she was black.  She astonishes African-Americans, too, when they learn she was white.  Hell, she wasn't even from the South, which I long believed; Spokane, Washington was her hometown.

I once had a book about Storyville, the red light district of New Orleans, which told the history of the section and, not surprisingly, the origins of jazz.  The first authenticated picture of a "jazz band" was of four or five barefoot, starved-looking street urchins, dated 1893.  The "Spazzy Jazzy Band" or something like that.  In case you had any doubt, it was sex music from the start, as the band's name suggests.  The kids played for change outside the whores' cribs. 

Anyway.  These kids were white.  And, to Chris's point, there were probably dozens of similar ragtag bands around then, with musicians high, low and white.  And I'll bet they were jamming together way back then.

Comments

[david J Rodriguez]

Terry, you should rant like this more often! I learn a lot on these occasions!

[Terry Hughes]

Ranting takes a lot of work. It's tiring. I'm lazy. I'm overmedicated. But, to please you and my legion of fans, I shall try.

[Richard]

To paraphase former NJ Governor Tom Kean, Jazz and Wine, perfect together.

[Terry Hughes]

This is true. Now THERE'S where the music/wine pairings get interesting!